10 terrifying uses of artificial intelligence

Many advances in artificial intelligence are innovative and extraordinary, but some are downright creepy. Here are 10 of the eeriest ways people are using, or could use, AI.

1. Robots predicting the future
2. Robot soldiers
3. Schizophrenic robot
4. Economic meltdown
5. Robots that deceive
6. Robot lovers
7. Survival robots
8. Police using AI algorithms to predict crimes
9. AI-based medical treatment
10. Autonomous drones and weapons

Read the post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

India’s digital transformation

The country can only derive the digital dividend of faster growth, more jobs and better services by expanding affordable Internet access to all/

There is little doubt that China has stolen a march on India when it comes to leveraging the Internet. Of the top 20 Internet companies in the world, 13 are American, five are Chinese, with one each for Japan and the United Kingdom. Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company, has a market capitalisation that is 25 times higher than that of Flipkart, the largest e-commerce company in India.

Why did India, which has had the remarkable achievement of being the largest exporter of information technology services and skilled manpower among developing countries, fall behind China in digitally transforming its economy? Is it now making a comeback? The World Bank’s recently released World Development Report (WDR) ‘Digital Dividends’ provides some answers.

The WDR finds that digital technologies have spread rapidly throughout much of the world, but their digital dividends — the broader development benefits from using these technologies — have lagged behind. In many instances digital technologies have boosted growth, expanded opportunities, and improved service delivery. Yet their aggregate impact has fallen short and is unevenly distributed.

The report argues that for digital technologies to confer their full benefit on society, it is vital to close the digital divide, especially in Internet access. But greater digital adoption will not be enough. To get the most out of the digital revolution, countries also need to work on its “analogue complements” — by strengthening regulations that ensure competition among businesses, by adapting workers’ skills to the demands of the new economy, and by ensuring that government institutions and others are accountable.

Read the center page article

Sounding the Alarm on a Future Epidemic: Alzheimer's Disease

We’re living longer. The number of U.S. adults 65 and older — roughly 40 million as of the 2010 census — is expected to nearly double to 71 million by 2030 and to reach 98 million by 2060. In much of the rest of the world, the story is the same. But if the aging trend illustrates the success of public health strategies, it also raises the specter of a major public health crisis — a sharp rise in the number of people living with Alzheimer’s disease.

Ron Brookmeyer, a professor in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics, has called attention to the looming Alzheimer’s epidemic through widely cited studies in which he has employed sophisticated computer models to project the number of cases, as well as the potential positive impact of future therapies and other strategies to prevent or delay the onset and progression of symptoms.

Brookmeyer’s work in this arena began nearly 20 years ago with a paper he wrote in the American Journal of Public Health projecting that the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in the United States would nearly quadruple by the middle of this century, by which time approximately 1 in 45 Americans will be afflicted. His 2007 study also projected that 1 in 85 persons worldwide will be living with the disease by 2050, with nearly half of them requiring a level of care equivalent to that of a nursing home.

Brookmeyer’s development of statistical models to make forecasts on epidemics began in the late 1980s with HIV/AIDS, but after becoming involved in a study on aging, he turned his attention to the threat posed by Alzheimer’s disease. “Obviously it’s not a transmissible epidemic like the ones I had been looking at, but with the aging of the population, it was clear that the numbers were going to explode,” he explains.

As part of his modeling, Brookmeyer and his colleagues consider both demographic trends and the severity of the progression of the disease. “This is a long illness,” he says. “Once you’re diagnosed, you might live with it for 10 or more years, and the intensity of the care required will vary during that time. From a public health point of view, it’s very important to look at where people will be in different stages of the disease and the needs we will be facing as a society.”

Read the full story

The arrival of Algorithmic business

What happens when 30 billion things connect with business and 3 billion people with smartphones? All these things and people generate vast amounts of rich data, and what companies do with that data – how they turn it into proprietary algorithms – will determine how well they maximize the opportunity presented by digital business.

“Algorithms are where the real value lies,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research, in the opening keynote to more than 8,500 CIOs and IT leaders at the sold out Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. “Algorithms define action.” Digital revenues have risen, IT organizations have gone bimodal, and the increased density of connections promises smart agents and algorithms that can do very complex things, including spawning their own, new algorithms and agents.

In today’s digital era, dynamic, digital algorithms are at the core of new customer interactions. Back in the day, Coco-Cola created a secret recipe; essentially, an algorithm; for a fountain drink that would build an empire.

Today, Amazon’s recommendation engine prompts people to buy more products, or the Waze algorithms give cars better routes based on thousands of independent inputs, changing traffic patterns dynamically in real time. Moving forward, companies will be valued not just on their big data, but on the algorithms that turn that data into actions and impact customers.

Companies will be valued not just on their big data, but on the algorithms that turn that data into actions and impact customers.

Read the post

5 videos that reveal the human impact on Earth

NASA is synonymous with space exploration, bringing to Earth awe-inspiring images of our solar system and the universe.

Recently, NASA started looking back home by creating the Landsat program, a series of satellites that continuously circle our planet, keeping an eye on how the human species is altering the Earth's surface.

Using Google Earth Engine, Illah Nourbakhsh and Randy Sargent from Carnegie Mellon University put together five sobering time-lapse videos showing the drastic changes our planet has gone through in a relatively short period of time.

1. The climate crisis
2. The race for resources
3. The future of forests
4. Asia’s industrialization
5. Water

View them

Generation Uphill

The millennials are the brainiest, best-educated generation ever. Yet their elders often stop them from reaching their full potential, argues Robert Guest.

his report takes a global view, since 85% of young people live in developing countries, and focuses on practical matters, such as education and jobs. And it will argue that the young are an oppressed minority, held back by their elders. They are unlike other oppressed minorities, of course. Their “oppressors” do not set out to harm them. On the contrary, they often love and nurture them. Many would gladly swap places with them, too.

Read the full post and related stories and the report

The race to 5G: Inside the fight for the future of mobile as we know it

The next generation of mobile technology, 5G, is beginning to take shape. Here's what it's trying to accomplish and how. And, why 5G could be the last standard we ever need.

Every ten years or so, something big happens in mobile. Once a decade, a new generation of mobile network technology comes along: the first mobile networks appeared in the 1980s, GSM followed in the 1990s, 3G arrived at the turn of the century, and LTE began rolling out in 2010.

Each generation has set out to fix the flaws of its predecessor: GSM fixed the security weaknesses of analogue telephony, 3G was meant to sort out GSM's lack of mobile data and, given it didn't much succeed, 4G was needed to finally make consuming data less of an unpleasant experience.

Now, 5G is emerging ahead of the turn of a new decade and the next big change to hit mobile. But what's the problem that 5G's meant to fix?

Here's the thing: no one's too sure about 5G, not really, not yet. The main gripes that people have with their mobile service today are coverage and price - neither of which are problems that need a new generation of mobile tech to solve. Throw a bit of cash into building out LTE and LTE-A and much of these headaches would go away, yet the industry is ploughing full steam ahead into 5G. Instead, the industry is hoping 5G will solve problems we don't have today, but those that could hold us back years in the future.

The process of building each new mobile standard begins years before it's put into use, and once up and running, those standards will remain in place in various forms for a decade or more. With 5G, we're having to build a standard that will still be in use in 2030 and beyond - and the mobile industry has a terrible track record when it comes to future-gazing.

Back at the start of 2000, with 3G just about to launch, who could have predicted how the mobile world would look in 2010? At the turn of this century, we all packed candy bar feature phones, now most of us have feature-packed smartphones.

Figuring out what uses 5G will be put to is the equivalent of trying to predict the rise of the iPhone five years before it launched. No one foresaw its arrival, or how the market would change in response to it, and how we'd end up where we are now. We're facing the same situation again: trying and imagine how the mobile world will look 10 years from now and design a standard to fit it.

If history is any guide, we're going to fail spectacularly again. That doesn't mean that the industry isn't going to try.

Read the full post

The New Art of War - How Trolls, Hackers and Spies are rewriting the rules of conflict

Cyberwar isn't going to be about hacking power stations. It's going to be far more subtle, and more dangerous.

Wandering the pretty, medieval streets of Tallinn's old town, it is hard to believe that the tiny country of Estonia has anything at all to do with cyberwarfare. But first as victim of an attack and now as home to some of the leading thinkers on how the digital battlefield will develop, the country has played a key role in its emergence and evolution.

Estonia is a country of around 1.3 million people, facing the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland, it borders Latvia to the south and Russia to the east. After decades as part of the Soviet Union, it regained independence in 1991.

Even today reminders of the Soviet times still abound in the capital Tallinn. There's a museum in one of the big downtown hotels showing how the KGB would bug the rooms of foreign guests.

But Estonia does not intend to be defined by its past, but is instead intent on creating the most advanced digital state on the planet. Since independence, Estonia has invested heavily in digital services. It leads the way with internet voting—in the 2011 election nearly a quarter of voters cast their ballots that way—and electronic tax filing, all underpinned by a nationwide digital signature infrastructure.

Today, you can even become an Estonian e-resident regardless of where you live in the world so you can use that same infrastructure to electronically sign contracts or set up your own company in the country.

But being so reliant on the internet carries a risk, as the country found out in 2007.

Plans by Estonian authorities to move a Soviet war memorial sparked a wave of website defacements and denial of service attacks in the country over a three week period, throwing Estonia's government services, newspapers, and businesses offline. The attacks temporarily disabled the websites of banks, ministries and political parties. Many pointed the finger at Russian hackers (Russia denied any involvement in the incident) but the events demonstrated how a purely digital attack on a state could have real-world consequences.

Read the full post

WE-COMMERCE: The sharing economy's uncertain path to changing the world

Peer-to-peer collaboration is gaining ground and changing the economics of the future, but there are questions to answer and obstacles to overcome.

Here's a typical story you're hearing about the sharing economy: Millennial needs ride to music festival. She lives 15 minutes from downtown, which has hardly any parking, and her city doesn't have an efficient public transportation system.

No cabs are available. She remembers the ride sharing service Lyft recently came to her city and downloads the app. Three minutes later, a guy who drives a neon green Dodge pulls in her driveway.

She finds out the driver had just started his shift after a day of work at his full-time job at a health insurance company. He likes the extra money, but he also enjoys meeting people and helping them out. There's no pink moustache on the front of his car like most Lyft drivers — it attracts too much attention.

They arrive at the music festival, she tips him, bids him well. She probably won't see him ever again, but for a short period of time, they had a mutually beneficial relationship.

That anecdote is likely one of the many reasons the "sharing economy" is still considered a hippie movement by some, and a yuppie San Francisco trend by others. Why would a Lyft ride be important for the future of global business?

The answer: trust.

Read the full post

Autonomous driving levels 0 to 5: Understanding the differences

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (in US) defined five different levels for self-driving cars, ranging from complete driver control to complete autonomy. Here's a primer.

Between the buzz over self-driving cars at CES 2016 and the Obama administration's announcement to invest almost $4 billion in autonomous vehicle research over the next 10 years, the race to create the best self-driving car has never been hotter.

And, the rise of self-driving cars is going to have a major impact on businesses and professionals. Automated vehicles could replace corporate fleets for deliveries or transporting employees, for example. And workers could gain productive hours in the day by working instead of driving during daily commutes. It is also poised to completely change the car insurance industry by reducing accidents—a new report predicts that accidents will drop by 80% by 2040.

Read the post

KPMG Report on "Automobile Insurance in the era of autonomous vehicles"

'Google Effect' Is Real, Dangerous, Says Kaspersky

By uploading more of the contents of our brain into our phones, we remember less and become more vulnerable.

If you're going to use your phone as your brain, you better use protection. That's the conclusion of a Kaspersky study on the "Google Effect," or what they call digital amnesia -- the practice of forgetting personal information because it can be easily stored on a mobile device. The study found that we're putting ourselves at risk by essentially shifting a portion of our personal memories into a public space.

Full Post

Related: Digital Amnesia Report

Related: 9 Ways Technology Is Slowly Killing Us All

E-Day for Greece: What will Euro-exit mean for IT?

One Friday, maybe even this week or next, the Greek prime minister will re-convene Parliament to make an important announcement: as of the following Monday, he will say, the euro will no longer be legal tender in Greece.

Instead, the country will re-adopt the drachma and all deposits in Greek banks will be converted back to the old currency at an arbitrary rate.

Accounts will be frozen and the people of Greece will be invited to spend the weekend queuing at their bank to convert a limited amount of euros to drachma if they wish to be able to buy essentials.

Over the course of that weekend, much ink will be spilt in the press reporting on the event from almost every angle.

But one consequence that is likely to be overlooked is the impact on IT professionals across the world, who will be called in to work around the clock to patch financial and other critical business systems. Until they can be sure that their organisations’ IT infrastructure will not miss a single euro-cent on Monday morning, it is unlikely they will be getting much sleep, let alone going home.

And after “Grexit”, who knows where it might end?

Read the full post

The rise and fall of television in India

Why does TV focus endlessly on the deeds of the least inspiring section of our society, the politicians?

A friend of mine recently donated her TV set to her maid. She says: “I felt depressed, even disgusted, by what I saw on TV.” Today, she is a happier and more positive person. “I’ve more time than before,” she says, “for friends, for travel, for walks and concerts and other simple pleasures.”

She isn’t alone. Others haven’t actually given away their TV sets but have stopped watching it. They do so only for the occasional movie, or for news of a major event.

I agree with my friend about the pernicious effects of television. TV channels are loaded with negativity. To be fair to them, they can do nothing about natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, tsunamis…) or about inhumanity (terrorist strikes, coups, violence, corruption, crime, rape…).

Read the Open Page article published in TH dt 7th Jul 2015

7 inspiring stories where technology is making a huge impact on human lives

Why an Indian born entrepreneur’s smart watch will save lives and transform healthcare

How technology is helping in making safe drinking water available for just 30 paise per litre

e-Mamta improves mother and child health service delivery in Gujarat

Can a startup transform Indian agriculture by using the cloud?

Innovative application shows the way to prevent female foeticide

How Andhra Pradesh is detecting diseases early using SMSes

How the cloud is enabling an umbrella of safety for school children

Read the full post

The impact of disruptive technology: A conversation with Eric Schmidt

From computational biology to 3-D printing, Google’s executive chairman provides a look into the future of technologies that will change business models and lives.

In this video, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt explores the phenomenon of technological disruption and selects those technologies likely to have the greatest impact on economies, business models, and people. This interview was conducted by James Manyika, a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, in February 2013. What follows is an edited transcript of Eric Schmidt’s remarks.

Read / Listen the interview

10 Industries That Will Gain From Adopting The Cloud

Cloud computing, or ‘cloud’ as it is popularly known as, is the latest trend in the computer world. Everyone is talking about it and everyday new developments are coming in. Cloud computing is like a huge switchboard; when you need a power outlet, just plug in your device; and when you are done, remove it. You do not have to carry a switchboard or an adapter with you everywhere.

Therefore, the switchboard becomes a ‘service’ given to you at a cost or for free (depending on the vendor). Without doubt, cloud computing is here to stay, and more and more industries are joining the vast virtual world. Let us look at ten industries that will gain from adopting the cloud.

1. Education
2. Marketing Companies
3. Online Entertainment
4. Healthcare
5. Information Technology
6. Finance and Banking
7. Telecommunication
8. Hospitality Industry
9. Start-ups
10. Security

Read the full post

How the Presidential Election Will Impact IT Outsourcing

The issue of offshore outsourcing and its impact on American jobs has been front and center throughout the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. But as election day draws near, both President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney are singing more or less the same tune on the subject-offshoring is bad; job creation is good.

But what will be the actual impact of the presidential election on offshoring and outsourcing in general? Will a Romney administration set a different tone on the subject of offshore job creation if he takes office?

Would a second Obama term result in new taxes on offshoring or increased skilled worker visa requirements or restrictions? Will either candidate's policies encourage domestic sourcing? And what's to come for public sector outsourcing at a time when federal, state and local governments are under increasing cost pressures?

Read the full post

Gartner: 10 Critical IT Trends for the Next Five Years

Trying to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to IT issues is not a job for the faint of heart. That point was driven home at Gartner's IT annual IT Symposium fest here where analyst David Cappuccio outlined what he called "new forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending."

The forces of cloud computing, social media/networking, mobility and information management are all evolving at a rapid pace. These evolutions are largely happening despite the controls that IT normally places on the use of technologies, Cappuccio stated. "IT was forced to support tablets, and end users forced them to support IM and wireless networks a few years ago. And more such technologies are on the horizon," he said.

Cappuccio's presentation listed the following as the "Ten Critical Trends and Technologies Impacting IT During the Next Five Years." The following is taken from Cappuccio's report:

1. Disruption
2. Software Defined Networks
3. Bigger data and storage
4. Hybrid clouds
5. Client server
6. The Internet of Things
7. Appliance madness
8. Complexity
9. Evolution toward the virtual data center>br> 10. IT demand

Read the full story

The impact of cybercrime on business

Cybercriminals today are increasingly leveraging malware, bots and other forms of sophisticated threats to attack organizations for various reasons, including financial gain, business disruption or political agendas. In many cases, cybercriminals often target multiple sites and organizations to increase the likelihood of an attack’s initial success and viral spread. With new variants of malware being generated on a daily basis, many companies struggle to fight these threats separately and the majority of attacks are often left undetected or unreported.

Download this whitepaper